Gender equality

Parental leave, family allowance, and improved overall conditions for day-care for babies and pre-schoolers continue to create the preconditions for the equal treatment of women as laid down in the Basic Law The Basic Law The Basic Law determines that Germany is a constitutional state: All state authorities are subject to judicial control. Section 1 of the Basic Law is of particular relevance. It stipulates that respect for human dignity is the most important aspect of the constitution: “Human dignity shall be… Read more › . Whereas in the education sector young women have not only caught up with, but in part overtaken young men (in 2023, 54 percent of those who attained a university entrance qualification were women, and women made up 51 percent of new students in 2023), there are still differences between the sexes as regards pay and career paths: On average, women working full-time only earn around 80 percent of the salary of their male counterparts. They also continue to be under-represented in managerial roles. According to an AllBright Foundation report, every fifth board member of Germany’s largest companies is a woman.

In 2015 the Law on Equal Participation of Women and Men in Leadership Positions entered into force in the private and public sectors. Among other things, it stipulates that women must occupy 30 percent of seats on the supervisory boards of companies listed on the stock exchange. In autumn 2020, the coalition government agreed on a quota for corporate boards: For publicly-listed companies in which the payroll is large enough to mean staff codetermination is mandatory, if there are more than three members then one member must be a woman in future. The Second Leadership Positions Act came into force in 2021, adding further stipulations for more gender equality in the executive and supervisory boards of major German companies, for companies in which the state owns a share and for certain top positions in the public sector. The proportion of women in the Bundestag The Bundestag The Bundestag is made up of the elected representatives of the German people. In principle elections to the Bundestag are proportionally representative, with each party’s share of the vote in the election reflecting the number of seats it occupies in the parliament. But the electoral system also… Read more › rose again recently, and is currently at 35.3 percent. That said, until 1983 less than 10 percent of the parliamentarians were women.